RSE - The history of Scots and English in 10 objects

What can objects tell us about the history of our languages?

Jeremy Smith, author and linguistics specialist, uncovers the unique stories and histories of English and Scots through ten extraordinary objects: a bone, a piece of jewellery, a stone cross, a jug, two manuscripts, two letters, a broadside sheet, and an early printed book. Each object is marked in ways that reveal how language was used in past societies.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, before the development of technologies for recording speech, languages of the past reached us only through written forms. These items are coded in ways that require careful interpretation.

In this event, Jeremy Smith will show ten historical objects on screen and tell us how their material features have helped reconstruct how texts functioned in their original societies, and how they have been understood since.